Healthy Cooking Tool: Hand Blender | Healthy Eats – Food Network Healthy Living Blog

Healthy Cooking Tool: Hand Blender by Michelle Buffardi in January Challenge, January 17, 2012

: Use a hand blender in recipes that call for a standard blender.

We’re teaming up with fellow food bloggers and healthy eating advocates to host a Healthy Every Week Challenge, a month-long initiative to develop healthy eating habits. The plan an is to develop a manageable healthy habit each week that will carry through the new year. Join us here and share what you’re eating on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #gethealthy.

One tool that no healthy home kitchen should be without is a hand blender (also called an immersion blender). This svelte little tool goes right into your soup, sauce or smoothie, allowing you to blend up something creamy, without transferring liquids from pot to blender. And with one of these, you’ll never deal with a soup-blender explosion again. When you close the lid on hot liquids and then blend, the steam can build up and cause the lid to blow off, sending hot soup flying all around your kitchen. When you bring the blender to the soup, that won’t happen.

You can even use this blender to mix up pancake or crepe batter in seconds.

Use a hand blender to make these recipes:

Mushroom-Hummus Soup

Nutty Sweet Potato Soup

Orange-Banana Smoothie

Lentil Soup

Butternut Squash Soup

Chicken Sate With Spicy Peanut Dipping Sauce

Souffle Pancake With Apple-Pear Compote

You can buy this Cuisinart hand blender for $29.99 at the Food Network Store, and if you join us tonight on Twitter at 8:30pm for a chat about healthy cooking at home (#gethealthy), we’re giving away two of these hand blenders at the end of the chat.

Tell us: Do you own a hand blender? How do you use yours?